Differences Between School-Aged Children with Apraxia of Speech and Other Speech Sound Disorders on Multisyllable Repetition.
Nina R Benway, Jonathan L Preston
PMID 34386587WHAT IT FOUND
Voicing changes, percent of structurally correct words, correct lexical stress, and syllable deletions significantly differentiated children with CAS from those with other speech sound disorders.
However, distributions overlapped heavily, so no single feature serves as a standalone diagnostic marker.
Key findings
01Four perceptual features from multisyllabic word repetition significantly differentiated the CAS group from the non-CAS SSD group: voicing changes, percent of structurally correct words, percent stress correct, and syllable deletions.
02Despite significant group differences, there was substantial overlap in the distributions of the two groups, indicating that no single measure would necessarily serve as a diagnostic marker in this sample.
03Features that had previously shown promise in other studies, such as epenthesis and percent phonemes correct, did not significantly differentiate the groups in this sample.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size was small, particularly for the CAS group (n=20), which limits the generalizability of the findings. The study used a conservative statistical correction for multiple comparisons, which may have masked differences in other features. Participants were older (7–17 years) than in many previous CAS studies, so findings may not apply to preschoolers. There was significant overlap in the data distributions between groups, reducing the diagnostic utility of any single feature. The literature review was not a full systematic review, so some relevant studies or features may have been missed. Inter-rater reliability for transcribing prosodic features (like stress) was lower than for segmental accuracy, which may affect the precision of those specific findings.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat the four significant features as definitive diagnostic markers for CAS. The study explicitly notes that there was a great deal of overlap between the groups, meaning a child can exhibit these errors without having CAS, or have CAS without exhibiting them as primary errors. Diagnosis requires a holistic view of multiple features, not a single test result.